Archive | May, 2010

Starting today, we’ll be taking a week off from the Internets and heading out on a tour of New England. We’ll be making several stops in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, so if you live in one of those great states, hoot and holler. We’ll be back next week sometime, so you all have yourselves a happy and healthy Memorial Day and I’ll see you real soon.

To help meet the demand for night sky interpretive programs, the National Park Service Night Sky Program last year recruited 19 volunteer astronomers from around the country who were then placed in national parks, started a loaner telescope collection, produced audio podcasts and brochures, and supported the stellar night sky poster art by Dr. Tyler Nordgren, an astronomer at the University of Redlands, California.

Nordgren spent a one-year sabbatical in national parks where he collected his experiences into a book and drafted the series of 14 posters that harken to the Works Progress Administration posters of the 1930′s. The full series of night sky posters is available for browsing here.

Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn
Circling above the hamlets as they nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame. ***

The tug of the waves at the helm, the boat heeling until the lee rail slashes the surface, the workaday world far behind. And then, the sound of the winch, as the genoa is trimmed to a new course heading between land and a few small reefs, where gulls scream at our passing. Up ahead is a small island. When we sail close, we can hear the waves crashing on the rocks. An explosion of wings and cries tells us we are intruding on pristine territory. When we change course again, a following wind drives us through the narrow mouth of a long fjord-like bay. The boat slows as we move into protected waters, and we see the cove, hidden now by sheer cliffs and a rocky point. Driftwood rises in tortured shapes from the small sand beach. On a low hill above the cove, a beaver dam and the sounds of wildlife everywhere. We drop anchor and row ashore, towards the sounds – sounds from the trees, from the pond, from the sky. Superb digital recording, as true to life, will help you recognize each creature of the hidden cove.

Paul Petzoldt (1908 – 1999) grew up in southern Idaho, and at the age of 16, made his first ascent of Wyoming’s Grand Teton wearing cowboy boots. He soon recognized the need to have better training and better preparation, and in the early 1930s, started the first guide concession in Grand Teton National Park.

In 1963, after years of developing mountaineering techniques, Paul Petzold testified before Congress in favor of the Wilderness Act. That same year, he helped establish the first American Outward Bound program in Colorado.

Two years later, in 1965, Petzoldt founded the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, Wyoming. NOLS is the leading nonprofit outdoor education school, with more than 120,000 alumni. NOLS has 14 locations around the world and educates more than 3,000 students annually.

I’d write my own little summary about today being the 30th anniversary of Mount St. Helens, but Boston.com couldn’t have done it better. They have a lot more amazing pictures, so be sure to click here.

On May 18th, 1980, thirty years ago today, at 8:32 a.m., the ground shook beneath Mount St. Helens in Washington state as a magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck, setting off one of the largest landslides in recorded history – the entire north slope of the volcano slid away. As the land moved, it exposed the superheated core of the volcano setting off gigantic explosions and eruptions of steam, ash and rock debris. The blast was heard hundreds of miles away, the pressure wave flattened entire forests, the heat melted glaciers and set off destructive mudflows, and 57 people lost their lives. The erupting ash column shot up 80,000 feet into the atmosphere for over 10 hours, depositing ash across Eastern Washington and 10 other states.